With My Childhood (Detstvo Gorkovo), Russian filmmaker Mark Donskoy launched his mammoth three-part adaptation of Maxim Gorki's autobiography. Donskoy does a magnificent job recreating rural Russia in the 1870s; he is less effective at pace and characterization, but these are minor flaws. In keeping with the current Party Line of 1938, the antagonists in the young Gorki's life are generally representives of the aristocrats or the Czarist regime. Alexei Lyarsky (here billed as Alyosha) plays the young Alexei Peshkov Gorki, constantly at the mercy of his nasty grandfather (M. G. Troyanovsky) and his avaricious uncles. Rest assured the boy will survive to appear in the next installment of the trilogy, My Apprenticeship. My Childhood is also known as Childhood of Maxim Gorky.